In
Jeffrey Herbst’s seminal book, States and Power in Africa:
Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, African
states and local traditional authorities are struggling over control of
land. Herbst’s prescient observation,
written in 2000, continues to unfold in dramatic ways today. Traditional authorities, historically the
custodians of customary land, are selling it to those with money and influence,
transferring an unknown but certainly large amount of land from future
generations of rural-born people to investors, speculators, and state-led
projects. For example, while it
continues to be widely reported that 94% of Zambia’s rural lands are under
customary tenure as it was at independence, a recent article estimates
that it is only 54% today due to massive reallocations of customary land by
chiefs to individuals with private tenure.

Are
traditional authorities selling off land they control now because of growing
signs – in the form of land bills, for example – that states are trying to
wrest control of their land? While it is
difficult to clearly establish whether chiefs are selling off land to urban
based investors, rural elites, and even successful smallholder farmers for fear
of eventual government regulations transferring land allocation powers to the
state, this is certainly a plausible premise in light of the fact that the
state has already dispossessed traditional authorities of the land they used to
control in a number of African countries.

The
result of such under-the-radar land reallocations is that the landscape of
African agriculture is rapidly changing.
In many African countries, it is no longer true that the vast majority
of farmland is under small-scale farms.
The national shares of area under cultivation and the value of marketed
crop output from medium-scale farms of 5 to 100 hectare have grown rapidly over
the past decade (Figure 1). In Ghana,
for example, the share of national cropped area under medium-scale farms rose
from 25% to 48% over the past twenty years, and medium-scale farms now account
for over half of all nationally marketed oilseeds and horticultural crops. This
is not happening everywhere. In densely
populated countries such as Rwanda and Uganda, the expansion of medium-scale
farms is proceeding slowly.

African
states seem to be generally supportive of such changes. They are keen to increase food production and
marketed farm output to feed their rapidly swelling cities and reduce
dependence on food imports. Putting land
into the hands of capitalized, educated, and entrepreneurial African farmers
supports this objective. Medium-scale
farms are attracting major new private investment by input suppliers that
improve market access conditions for nearby smallholders. Farming areas with a high concentration of
medium-scale farms attract greater investment by
large-scale grain buyers. In Tanzania, small-scale
farms are much more likely to rent mechanisation services in areas with a high
concentration of medium-scale farms. Other
evidence from Tanzania indicates
that smallholder household incomes are positively and significantly associated
with the share of land in the district controlled by 5-10 hectare farms, after
controlling for market access, rainfall, and other local conditions.

However,
there are warning signs as well. The acquisition
of land by outside investors certainly reduces the stock of land under
customary tenure that will be accessible to current and future generations of
local people. As traditional authorities
sell off land to outside investors based on willingness to pay criteria, their
actions are raising the price of land, making it more difficult for young
people to acquire land, and raising the likelihood that they will exit farming
and migrate out of the area. The rise of
land markets is creating a new class of landless workers in Africa, who sell
their land informally to others, and become dependent on the local non-farm
economy for their livelihoods.

Given
the scale of the acquisitions, a major question is how investor farmers are
viewed by those in customary communities – as sources of economic dynamism and
employment or as exploiter?
Historically, the nature of land conflicts in Africa centers on
dynamics between autochthonous
members of a community (i.e., those with a real or mythic link to a community’s
original inhabitants or settlers) and strangers, or newcomers. As with emergent investor farmers, strangers
have been attracted to certain lands because of their commercialisation
potential (e.g., cocoa in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire; rice in Tanzania; and maize
in Zambia). Conflicts with long-established customary communities would
invariably follow. However, security at the national level depended on whether
the central government consistently favoured autochthonous communities or the
stranger, newcomers. An open question is how the emergent investor farmer
phenomenon maps onto these well-documented dynamics across Africa. Will African investor farmers be regarded as
strangers with marginal familial and social connection to local
communities? Whom will African
governments favour in a context of rising land scarcity and palpable tenure
insecurity?

Implications for agricultural
policies

A
major policy question for African governments and international development
partners concerns the future role of smallholder farms in Africa. While opinions are divided, our
interpretation of available evidence is that governments must focus explicitly on
promoting the productivity of smallholder farms to achieve agricultural and
economic transformation with
poverty reduction. Inclusive forms of
rural income growth are likely to accelerate the pace and equity of structural
transformation processes. Where
competition for land is not intense, new investment in medium-scale farms can
be a powerful source of economic dynamism, attracting private sector
investments in input and output markets that improve market access conditions
and the commercialisation potential of small-scale farms. In such areas, questions of “either/or” might
be somewhat misplaced.

However,
in densely populated areas where small-scale farms predominate and where there
remains limited additional land for area expansion, the priority is clear: focus on promoting the productive potential
of small farms, realizing that success in this endeavour will lead to
progressive movements of individuals and households out of farming and into
off-farm jobs as part of the structural transformation process. In short, a successful smallholder-led
agricultural strategy will result in a declining share of the labour force in
farming over time.

Conclusions

Our
view about the role of medium-scale farms is that they should be allowed to
develop under a land tenure policy that does not conflict with land tenure
security of indigenous rural people or foreclose area expansion opportunities
for small-scale farm households. Medium-scale farms appear to be a source of
rural dynamism as long as they are not displacing indigenous rural people in
the process. Land registration and
certification procedures – in sync with customary social norms and institutions
– will be needed to provide such protection.

Many
African governments, sometimes unwittingly, are already making decisions about
which scale of farming to promote by their land policies and agricultural
sector expenditures. Rather than
investing in infrastructure, technologies and extension services that benefits all
farmers large and small, many public expenditures are being captured by farms
that produce and sell the most – which means a bias toward larger farms. In Zambia, for example, about 50% of the
government’s agricultural budget goes into subsidy programs benefitting the
most privileged 5% of farmers. Similarly, government preoccupation with
clearing the way for land market transactions, despite extensive rhetoric to
the contrary, is largely focused on trying to create ways for large investors to
gain access to land. Inclusive forms of
rural transformation will require greater attention to supporting smallholder
farms even as larger farms gain greater traction in the region.

We
believe that a small-scale farm-led agricultural transformation strategy could
have succeeded, and could still succeed in parts of Africa, as it did in much
of Asia, provided that African governments provide sustained support for
smallholders through policies and public expenditures targeted toward
them. Ethiopia and Rwanda appear to be
pursuing such a strategy with reasonable success, but it is difficult to
identify many other African governments that have demonstrated a sustained
commitment to smallholder-led development. Consequently, we are likely to see the face of
African agriculture continue to be slowly re-shaped toward medium- and
large-scale activities.

Written by: T. S. Jayne, Milu Muyanga, and Caleb Stevens

Photo credit: Milu Muyanga

This blog summarises work from a
forthcoming APRA Workstream 3 report on Changes in Farm Size Distributions in
Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jayne and Muyanga are professors
in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics at Michigan
State University and members of the APRA team.
Stevens is USAID’s Land and Resource Governance Advisor.

About Future Agricultures

The Future Agricultures Consortium is an Africa-based alliance of research organisations seeking to provide timely, high-quality and independent information and advice to improve agricultural policy and practice in Africa.